Blaise pascal39s essay on conic sections

Blaise Pascal never saw his 40th birthday. He was an anguished, illness-ridden, often lonely man, who, at the cutting edge of contemporary scientific experimentation, felt keenly the intellectual ferment of his day. One November night in 1654, he experienced a profound encounter with God, which turned a distant and arid faith into a gripping sense of mission and devotion. He died eight years later in voluntary poverty, leaving behind scattered papers which were probably intended as a grand Apology for Christianity, conceived very much with people like Descartes in mind. These were subsequently gathered together and published by his friends as the famous “Pensées”, “Thoughts on Religion and various other subjects.” Throughout these jottings, we can see Pascal countering two opposing attitudes, very familiar to his contemporaries, and also very familiar today, a fact which makes him such a fascinating figure for us.

List of the Greatest Mathematicians ever and their Contributions

Fellow geniuses are the best judges of genius, and BlaisePascal had this to say of Fermat:"For my part, I confess that [Fermat's researches about numbers]are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them."E.T.

Pascal’s Triangle is a wonderful mathematical construct—with infinite richness available to anybody who gives it a second or third look. One of the properties of this triangle, named after Blaise Pascal the French mathematician, is that it left-right symmetric. This design, which is a wall-reflection ambigram for the word “Pascal”, is also left-right symmetric. And it is also a bit of a joke on the fact that this is a triangle made of of Pascals (without an apostrophe) as opposed to the eponymous Pascal’s Triangle (a triangle of, as in belonging to, Pascal). I know, I know this is a stupid joke… but those are the best kind, right?